


Daffodil Summer

by Laonhana



Series: Flores Mortis [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: ? - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Different Serum, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hanahaki Disease, Infinity War, M/M, Magical Realism, Multi, Non-Serum Steve Rogers/Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes | Shrinkyclinks, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Pining, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Sorry Not Sorry, Unrequited Love, Well - Freeform, aftershock, not exactly, the author needed to heal after IW, with a happy ending?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2019-05-14 02:02:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14760512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laonhana/pseuds/Laonhana
Summary: He picks up the petal carefully, and finds that it’s real. The silky-soft surface feels fragile between Steve’s fingers, like a piece of tissue paper caught in the wind. Steve stares at it for a while before he’s coughing again, in a fit to rival his childhood bouts of pneumonia.When he opens his eyes again, he finds three more petals scattered across his sketchbook. There’s an odd, flowery taste in his mouth. He pulls one more off his tongue, and stares at it where it lies against his palm.Oh god, he thinks, feeling a painful ache starting in the back of his throat. He’s in love with his best friend.





	Daffodil Summer

**Author's Note:**

> (Quick warning; if you don't like blood, tread carefully. There's actually not a lot of blood, but there're a few appearances.)

The first time Steve sees someone with the sickness, it’s a girl in his literature class.

Her name’s Jane, and she’s a brilliant girl with dark hair and laughing eyes. She’s one year above Steve and Bucky, but since Steve takes the Advanced Lit classes, he runs into her every other day. Unlike a lot of people, Jane isn’t judging of Steve’s frail body and constant awkwardness. She and her friend Darcy are actually pretty cool, and whenever the teacher assigns them in groups, they stick up for Steve.

One day, though, Jane comes in with a tired look on her face. When Steve asks about it, she just shrugs and passes it off as a cold. At first, everyone believes her. But then she starts to cough in class, consistently, and the teachers grow more worried by the day.

And then, one morning, Jane stands up to read an Emily Dickinson poem out loud, when she starts coughing violently. Like she’s choking on something invisible- like something’s caught in her throat. By the time she stops, her whole desk is littered with brilliantly scarlet petals.

She’s taken away to the nurse’s office at once, and Darcy is in hysterics. Steve doesn’t really understand what’s just happened, not until Mr. Xavier- the biology teacher- tells him it’s a form of lovesickness. An actual disease caused by unrequited (or ended) love and emotional distress. Hanahaki Disease, it’s named, and Steve also learns that Jane has a benign strain of it.

“Nearly 10 percent of all victims die from it,” the kindly teacher tells him. “But the benign strain wears off naturally most of the time. The critical strain is what you should look out for, because once you get into stage four, the disease rapidly kills your physical body. Of course, the deterioration stage can take a long time for some people, but the case mortality rate for the critical strain is nearly 80%.”

Steve doesn’t think a lot about the Hanahaki Disease for a long time. It doesn’t matter after Jane returns to school two weeks later, and even less when she begins dating Thor Odinson from two grades up a month later. So Steve forgets about that tragically beautiful disease, about the feathery red petals that’d dropped from Jane’s paled lips.

When he’s twenty-three, though, he’s forcefully reminded of it when a daffodil falls in his paint.

It’s three in the morning when it happens, and Steve is sitting at his cluttered desk, frowning over a half-finished side portrait of Bucky. It doesn’t quite bring out the guy Steve wants to put to paper, the sly, mischievous grin his best friend has. Nor does it accurately portray the cocky bravado Bucky sometimes wears when they’re at parties and group outings. Between the two of them, Bucky’s always been the more popular guy, the confident, persuasive one. There’s a certain softness to his boyish charm that Steve’s privy to, a slice of Bucky’s personality Steve wants painted on canvas.

He thinks of Bucky’s laugh whenever Steve says something especially snarky, that little worried crease he gets when the smaller boy comes home with a split lip and bruised knuckles. He thinks of the way Bucky dares Steve to do things everybody else is either too afraid or too condescending to tell him to try. He also thinks of Bucky’s girlfriend, Natasha, and suddenly Steve’s coughing uncontrollably, hunched over his drying paper.

At first, he thinks it’s because of that nagging headache he’s had for a week. He grimaces and reaches for his coffee mug, when the back of his hand brushes against something soft and wet. Frozen, he looks down at his palette to find a bright yellow petal lying against the haphazard mix of red and white paint, almost macabre in its delicate form. For a moment Steve doesn’t even think of Jane, all those years ago, and wonders if he somehow managed to hallucinate from five mugs of caffeine.

Then he picks up the petal carefully, and finds that it’s real. The silky-soft surface feels fragile between Steve’s fingers, like a piece of tissue paper caught in the wind. Steve stares at it for a while before he’s coughing again, in a fit to rival his childhood bouts of pneumonia.

When he opens his eyes again, he finds three more petals scattered across his sketchbook. There’s an odd, flowery taste in his mouth. He pulls one more off his tongue, and stares at it where it lies against his palm.

Oh god, he thinks, feeling a painful ache starting in the back of his throat. He’s in love with his best friend.

 

+++

Of course, the next day is when Bucky decides to barge into Steve’s bedroom with a bundle of breadsticks. Steve is understandably confused when Bucky tosses them at Steve’s grumpy face.

“C’mon, Steve,” Bucky laughs, leaning against Steve’s doorway. “You promised me you’d eat all of my terrible breadsticks if I went and reviewed your comic panels,” he says. “But really, you named your character Captain America? Jesus, Stevie, I almost thought it was the 1940s again.”

Steve snorts and rolls his eyes, uncomfortably aware of the cough building up in his chest.

“I said I’d eat all of your terrible baking, jerk,” he answers, picking up one of the breadsticks. “But I thought you’d bake me apple cake at least. Breadsticks? What are you, an outdated meme?”

He still shoves one end of the bread into his mouth and makes a face. He can never understand how Bucky always managed to bake things that look perfectly fine and taste like bland oatmeal. Though, he contemplates, that might just be how all breadsticks taste.

Bucky mock-frowns when he sees Steve’s face. “Is it that bad? I thought breadsticks were actually supposed to taste like nothing.”

Steve swallows the offending pastry (is it really a pastry, though?) down and picks up the remaining two pieces. “Well, don’t ask me, Buck. I had seven shots of coffee last night I’m not even sure I could taste a jalapeno pepper.”

He heads to where Bucky’s standing at his door, before pausing briefly. “But,” Steve says, patting Bucky’s arm consolingly, “I’d stick to cars if I were you.”

In the ensuing escape, Bucky stubs his toe against the crooked coffee table in their living room, cursing. Steve manages to make it to the front door before he’s laughing at Bucky’s offended and wounded expression. They scuffle around a little bit before Steve extracts himself from the mess, declaring it time for a late brunch.

After they finish off the _edible_ sandwiches from yesterday’s order, Steve excuses himself and gets ready for his lecture. It’s only when Bucky tells him he’ll be out until eight that Steve pauses, uncertain.

“Why?” he asks, halfway through putting on his coat.

“I didn’t tell you?” Bucky frowns, scratching his cheek. “Nat’s going out to Russia for a business trip next Sunday. Last date before she leaves, actually.”

It is only then that Steve’s reality comes crashing down around him. He loses his grip on his coat sleeve and has to flail around before Bucky’s coming to the rescue, helping him into the oversized garment. He gives a hurried thanks and goodbye before he’s practically running out the door.

In the elevator, Steve coughs so hard that petals fall from his lips in spades. Some of them ghost over the sides of his cupped hands, and he has to scramble to pick them up so that nobody else notices. The petals are thicker than yesterday, a garish yellow against the muted colors of the winter-logged city.

It’s not even like Steve can dislike Nat. Natasha had been Steve’s friend before she’d ever met Bucky, an intimidating, beautiful woman who’d taught Steve more defensive moves in a day than his trainer had ever known. She was smart and kind and clear-headed, grounded in a way Steve and Bucky weren’t. When Steve had broken up with Brock in freshman year, she’d brought over three bottles of proper Russian vodka and had kicked the asshole’s ass the next time he’d shown up at Steve’s favorite bar. Steve’s pretty sure she could snap a guy’s neck in a second if she wanted to.

So Steve swallows down the throbbing pain in his mouth, and makes his way down to the bus stop, all too aware of the flowers taking root in his chest.

 

+++

Adjusting to the constant stream of petals takes a while, but Steve manages it.

Whenever he coughs in front of Bucky, he’s careful to make sure none of the petals (or the words) brimming in his throat falls past his teeth. Bucky is worried about Steve’s constant fits, but Steve reminds him that Steve got the successful enhancement treatment years ago, and that while he’s still the skinny, clumsy little guy he’s probably got stronger immunity than Bucky himself.

After a while, his best friend backs off. He still keeps bombarding Steve with cough drops and random fever checks, to which Steve responds with a sarcastic quip and good-natured deflection. For nearly three weeks Steve thinks it’s a fluke, that it’s a benign strain of Hanahaki like Jane had had.

But of course, Steve’s never had much luck when it came to health.

 

The doctor tells him he’s gone too quickly past stages one, two, and three. He’ll be in stage four soon, she tells him, writing him a prescription for a bottle of meds. They’re made from the Adriane’s Sugarplum flowers, the only known medication for the Hanahaki Disease. Steve pays for the meds and leaves with the bottle of bright blue pills, almost too beautiful. It’s ironic, he thinks, how something that kills you is poetic in every other way.

That night when he returns home, he finds Bucky with a half-finished pack of beer. He doesn’t look remotely drunk, only angry, so Steve sighs and brings out the remaining vodka from Natasha’s last visit. He’s surprised when Bucky barely even looks at the bottle before downing the whole crate of beer packs.

Later, Steve’s pleasantly buzzed and partly asleep when Bucky curls a hand around his wrist, gently. “She dumped me,” the taller man mumbles into Steve’s shoulder. Steve’s t-shirt grows damp as Bucky spills his drunken woes onto the fabric, drained pack still clutched in his hand. “I dunno why she even dated me in the first place,” he says, “I always knew she and Clint had fucking history, but Clint told me they’d never fucking dated.”

Steve persuades Bucky to go to bed in Bucky’s own bedroom, half pushing, half buried under Bucky’s weight. Eventually he manages to fit the big idiot into the bed and gets back to the living room, planning to go to sleep himself. It is when Bucky’s snoring and most of the trash thrown properly away when Steve feels his throat closing up, and then he’s coughing out a spray of petals into the kitchen sink.

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, the faint scent and bitter taste of flowers stuck to his tongue. He washes down the petals, watching them swirl down the pipes.

Steve’s almost hopeful that night, and the next morning, when his coughs let up enough for him to feel particularly good.

The flowery parasite in his lungs begins to act up again when Bucky tells him he’s enlisting.

“Been thinking ’bout it for a while,” the brunet says. He chews on the end of his fork thoughtfully. “Now that Nat’s done with me and that I’ve finished my degree last semester, I think it’s the right time to try, right?”

It was supposed to be a normal Friday night, Steve thinks desperately. The Awful Sci-Fi Movie Night™, when Steve and Bucky are supposed to laugh at bad puns and hilariously named deux ex machinas in movies like _Robocop_ and _Heartbeeps_. Instead he’s sitting here, listening to his best friend and unrequited love telling him he’s leaving.

Not for good, Steve tells himself. You can talk to him when he comes back.

“Oh really?” Steve says, grinning forcefully. “They say they’ll take an idiot like you?”

Bucky laughs, and tilts his head. “Well, I’ll make sure to leave all the stupid behind with you for safekeeping,” he answers.

Steve snorts and takes a gulp of water, fighting down the nauseous swell of floral buds in his chest.

Afterwards, Steve lets Bucky choose the Star Wars prequels, even if it isn’t an Awful Sci-Fi Movie (“But it is, Stevie! Just look at all those plotholes!”). He sits and thinks about the petal-ridden portrait of Bucky he’s hidden in his room, and the handfuls of yellow stuffed into the trashcan.

When the movie ends, Steve curls up against a snoring Bucky’s side and pretends to sleep, his dreams floating far away from the deathly love growing in his ribcage.

 

+++

Bucky leaves on a late spring day, freshly washed and shaved. He grins when Steve hugs him tightly, pretending to have hurt his ribs.

“Owie, Steve,” he groans, “let a guy breathe, will you?”

Steve growls in frustration and squeezes him even tighter before letting go, taking a step backwards. Bucky is as handsome and charming as ever, combed dark hair cut short and neat. The taller guy is shouldering a satchel bag, and Steve fights the urge to snatch and run with it.

“Be careful,” he tells him. The cocky bastard just smirks and dodges his weak punch.

“Back at you,” Bucky says. His brow creases a little as he looks Steve up and down. “You’re not gonna get into any fights without me there to back you up, right?”

Steve just raises an eyebrow and presents his left hand, which has a bandage wrapped around it from the last time he tried to punch an asshole catcalling a teenage girl. “Don’t know about that, but I’ll try and keep this under wraps,” he jokes.

Bucky rolls his eyes. “Gonna miss you, punk,” he says, a faint, soft smile on his lips.

Steve answers with a slight smile of his own. “Me too, jerk.”

Bucky finally walks away, and Steve rubs at the steady ache building around his windpipe as he waves.

He barely makes it to the nearest bathroom before he’s throwing up petals, choking and gasping around the flowery mess. When he lifts his eyes to the mirror, there’s blood on his lips and a heavy scent on his tongue. He opens his mouth to find a large, bloodied blossom, the scarlet stark against the pure golden yellow of the daffodil.

 

+++

Sometime later, when Steve is getting used to the constant rawness of his throat, a soldier shows up at his apartment door. They were on an extraction mission, he tells him. Things went wrong and…

Bucky’s missing.

Steve can’t breathe.

He tries to speak past a mouthful of petals and chokes, anger boiling in his veins. He tries to demand the army finds Bucky, right fucking now, but instead of words, daffodil blossoms drop from his lips. His fists are white-knuckled, fingernails biting red crescents into his palms, when the soldier looks at him with saddened sympathy. “Here,” he finally says, holding out a phone. “Call me when you’re feeling better, and I’ll see what I can do.” He looks saddened, tired eyes genuine and kind.

The soldier’s name is Sam Wilson, and he’s lost his best friend Riley in the same operation that Bucky went AWOL during. He’s planning on retiring from the army and working as a VA counselor, since he did his psychology degree before scooting off to be on the front lines.

Sam is just as strong-headed as Steve is, but he’s also much more calm and collected. Once, when Steve tried to fight off a whole group of drunk, fraternity bullies, Sam holds him back and calls the bouncers to take care of the situation. He talks the police officers into questioning the offenders before he takes Steve home to calm down.

They become fast friends, and one day Sam sits down across from Steve at a café and asks, “It’s him, right?”

Steve scrunches up his brows. “Who?”

“The flowers. It’s Barnes, isn’t it?”

Steve begins to cough again, flowers stuck in his windpipe. When he spits them out, there’s a new, bright blue bud mixed in with the usual bright yellow.

Sam picks it up and rolls it between his fingers. “A cornflower,” he says quietly. He looks at Steve with a heavy sigh, tucks the flower into Steve’s hand. “Symbolizes friendship.”

Friendship, Steve thinks humorlessly. Cornflower, friendship. Daffodil, unrequited love. He’s beginning to wonder if the heavens think they’re being funny, or if God rolled dice when it came to Steve’s love life and managed to get a full set of ones.

“Cheer up,” Sam tells him. “Flower meanings have no shit on the Hanahaki, okay? Maybe Barnes just likes blue and yellow,”

 

+++

There was an artist who fell in love with everything and everyone, who used the flowers that fell from his aching heart to immortalize his paintings. Carefully dried, preserved petals are pasted onto paper and painted over with glaze and color, the modernist strokes blending in beautifully with the mix of lavender, rose, and honeysuckle leaves. Steve saw his final masterpiece once, a blooming bouquet of colors spiraling out from a single center; a royal blue rose. It’s said that the artist, upon seeing the blue rose, wrote to his friends that it would be his last _flores mortis_. It’s an artistic way to die, perhaps. The single blot of blood on the dark blue rose punctuates the last of the artist’s life.

Before that first yellow blot on his life, Steve would’ve appreciated this masterpiece in quiet. Now, he feels like he wants to do the same to his own flowers, to leave them as a final farewell to the world.

He doesn’t do that, though. Instead, he leaves some blue and yellow petals pressed between the pages of his late ma’s recipe book, staining some of the sentimental pages with a faint sweet scent. It serves well as a memento, Steve tells himself.

His seventh cornflower sits in the trashbin when Sam calls. The sudden ring of his phone makes Steve jump a little.

“Hello?” he answers carefully.

“Holy shit, Steve,” Sam says, breathless. “You’ve got to see the news. Now. Get on your phone and pull up that TIMES app I know you have in there. Trust me, you won’t regret it.”

Fumbling, Steve flicks his phone on. He does indeed have the TIMES app installed, and within a minute he has it running.

He quickly scans the front page for anything of interest. At first, he doesn’t see it, but then-

“God,” he breathes, eyes wide. Sam shouts something from the phone’s speaker, voice tinny and triumphant, but Steve ignores it in favor of hurriedly opening the link.

BILLIONAIRE TONY STARK MAKES DARING ESCAPE FROM TERRORIST CAMP, the headline reads. But the important part, in fact, is the smaller text underneath. EFFORTLESSLY RESCUES US ARMY CAPTIVES ALONG WITH HIM.

The camp Tony Stark has escaped from is the same one Bucky was supposedly taken to.

For one frightening, heart-stopping moment, Steve can’t move. He’s frozen in place with shock and joy and daring hope, a well of emotion thundering between his ears. He doesn’t even realize he’s crying until he’s choking on them, until the flowers running down his chin tumble into his shaking hands spotted with tears.

“-Steve?” Sam calls out from his phone. “Ah, shit, you okay?”

In response, Steve lets out a shuddering gasp.

“You’re breathing, so that’s good. Tell you what, I’ll ask around for any information on whether or not Barnes is out, okay? I’ll get right back to you. Be careful with those nasty flowers, alright?”

The connection ends with a click. Steve sags against the couch, feeling like he’s just lost a thousand tons of weight.

He’s almost content to let the daffodils take over his lungs.

 

+++

James Buchanan Barnes returns home, in more or less one piece.

Natasha calls Steve the day Steve gets the good news. He doesn’t even ask how she knew, because Steve’s pretty sure she’s some kind of super spy or something, and she’ll have to kill him if he asked. Instead he agrees to her offer to take him to Stark Industries, where they’re fitting Bucky with a bionic arm to make up for his lost limb.

“You sure you’ll be alright?” Natasha asks, with a side tilt to her head that’s eerily like Bucky’s. Steve smiles and shrugs, feeling lighter than he has in ages. “100 percent,” he tells her.

Her sharp eyes zone in on him. She probably already knows about Steve’s condition, one way or the other. “If you say so,” she says amiably. “Call me when he’s feeling good enough for visitors, alright?”

Steve nods and waves as she drives off.

As it turns out, Bucky is barely recuperating from his stint at the terrorist camp. The doctor who leads Steve do Bucky’s room tells him that the jerk had tried to save his team by jumping into the bloody fray himself, and the gunshot wound on his left arm had been left alone too long for the doctors to save the limb.

The young artist slips quietly into the room with the doctor’s warning fresh in his ears. “He may have some memory issues,” the doctor had told him. “Don’t be too loud with him.”

There’s a man lying on the white, crisp sheets of the cot. His face is hidden by a mane of dark, ragged hair, and bandages swathe his body in large bundles. The left arm is sleek chrome and all plated metal, with dark grey lining the edges.

Steve’s heart is lodged in his throat when he steps tentatively closer to the prone figure. The sterilized hospital room reminds him too much of his sickly childhood, but he makes it without wobbling to the cot’s side.

It’s Bucky all right. There might be a few extra months of scruff and wear on his face, but it’s his Bucky. Steve almost laughs in relief as he grips Bucky’s uninjured hand.

“Buck,” he murmurs, “can you hear me?”

Bucky’s eyelids flutter open. There’s a glazed look in his eyes Steve hopes is from the drugs he’s on, not anything the camp did to him. But they focus on Steve’s face, and widen in what he hoped is recognition.

“Hey, moron,” Steve says affectionately. “Who told you to go get yourself all blown up?”

The dazed-looking eyes crinkle slightly, and Steve grins down at him. “Thought you weren’t coming back home for a moment there,” Steve says, throat closing up. “Jerk, you were supposed to leave the stupid with me. I was looking after it for you, y’know?”

A hoarse chuckle escapes Bucky’s throat. “Stevie?” comes the small question, so weak and muffled behind the devices connected to his throat that Steve barely hears it.

“Yeah,” Steve answers, swallowing down bitter flowers in his mouth. “I’m here.”

Steve talks at Bucky for a while, even when Bucky’s eyelids slip shut and his breathing evens out. He’s still talking when the door slides open with a small hiss.

An unfamiliar man, dressed in a sharp suit set with styled hair, steps into the immaculate room. The prominent dark circles under his eyes and the sunglasses don’t help his overall jumpiness as he glances at Steve.

“Ah,” the man mumbles, “Brunet Jaime Lannister’s best friend, right? Rogers?”

Steve fights the urge to frown and inches closer to Bucky. “Er, yeah. And you are…?”

The man laughs, but it’s more one of habit and not mirth, the rough sound seeming almost unnatural. “I’m actually surprised you don’t know me.” Steve stiffens at this, ready to defend himself against an egotistical businessman if he has to. The stranger notices. “Nah, it’s not like that- though I do have a healthy ego, thank you very much. It’s just that I’ve been on the news a lot lately, what with the ‘daring escape’ story and all. Tony Stark, at your service,” he says.

This, if Steve’s being honest, surprises him a little. “Huh,” is all he says. He looks down at Bucky again, throat dry and rough. “I guess I have to thank you for bringing him back,” he adds.

Tony Stark sits heavily in the second visitor’s chair. “Well. Well, I think we’re even. He did save my life back there, when, ah, they tried to shoot my hand.”

That… does sound like something Bucky would do, Steve acknowledges. Maybe this is why Mrs. Frost always told them they were too codependent. Steve’s recklessness tended to rub off on others around him. Exhibit A; Bucky Barnes, soldier extraordinaire.

“Anyways,” Stark continues. “Did you know Brownielocks here has Hanahaki? Nasty thing, it is. I had a close experience with a few narcissus petals back in college, but… Barnes had it bad.”

Steve halts in his seat. “What?” he asks, dazed.

“Oh. You didn’t know? So this is a new thing, I guess. Just wanted to tell you in case the doctor comes in asking about prior illnesses. Wouldn’t believe me much, but I thought it was worth asking, Sunflower.”

Bucky loves someone. And it’s unrequited. Steve’s heart sinks to his stomach. It’s Nat, he thinks. It has to be Nat. They’d broken up just before Bucky enlisted and he ended up with the affliction just a month or two after that? It’s so dazzlingly clear that Steve feels an iron stubbornness in his gut.

Stark notices Steve’s clenched fists. “You have no idea who it is, do you?” he says, a bit of sympathy coloring his oddly intoned words.

Steve shakes his head. “I think I know,” he says, but doesn’t elaborate.

The room falls silent, save for the beeping of the machines. Steve twists the edge of the white hospital blanket between his fingers.

“Do you know when he’ll be able to go home?” he asks.

The answer comes from the ceiling. “In approximately twelve days, Mr. Rogers.”

There’s nothing in the room save for the medical equipment and Tony Stark. Steve looks around, trying to locate a speaker. Even with his observant eyes, he finds none.

“That’s JARVIS, my AI. He’ll take good care of Barnes until he’s ready to go home.”

The billionaire looks at Steve for a long moment before standing and clapping a hand on the younger man’s shoulder.

“And you, Sunflower-boy, should go home yourself. The doctors need to work on Barnes still; we’ll give you a call when all the operations are stabilized. You’ll do more harm than good if you stay here, ‘kay?”

It takes all of Steve’s common sense (not that there’s much of it) to keep his stubbornness from rearing his head. He bites back a protest and nods sharply. “Thanks,” he chokes out. Stark smiles crookedly at him, a deep exhaustion embedded into his face. “My pleasure,” he drawls in answer surprisingly sincere.

The journey back home leaves the bus Steve’s riding littered with wilting daffodils and blooming cornflowers. He doesn’t even care to gather them up and instead ducks away, heart pounding in his ears, until he can rush off the bus and into his apartment building.

Steve Rogers may be fearless when it comes to helping others, but when it comes to himself, he allows himself a little fear and doubt. That is why he digs out the unfinished portrait of Bucky Barnes, tears it in half, and digs into his paints with fervor.

This one will be the last try, he hopes.

 

+++

The first thing Steve notices when he returns to Bucky’s room is the bouquet of mint on the side table.

“Mint?” Steve says incredulously the moment he opens the door. “For real, Buck?”

The man in question looks a lot better than when Steve last saw him. His dark hair is done up in a neat bun, and he’s dressed in a clean white shirt and trousers. He even cracks a smile when he sees Steve, though the crooked line barely even curves his lips.

“Yeah, well,” he croaks, “Stark puts up a convincing argument when it comes to mint chocolate ice cream.”

His voice is terrible, hoarse and rough and wet. It’s more than simple disuse, Steve thinks, concerned. Bucky sounds like how Steve used to when he was sick to the death with a cough. He sounds like Steve does normally now, after coughing up half a bucket of blood-speckled flora.

Bucky seems to have noticed the same thing about Steve too, because he frowns and reaches out a hesitant hand. “Are you okay, Steve? You sound almost as- as bad as I do.”

Steve’s throat closes up. This is it, he thinks to himself. _You should tell him._

“Someone had me worried for three months straight,” he says, “can’t believe I’d sound fucking great.”

It comes out harsher than Steve intended, and he winces. “Sorry,” he rasps, settling at Bucky’s side.

His friend smiles up at him, a small, private little ghost of a thing on his lips. It hurts how much Steve wants to kiss that little wisp into a full-blown grin, to watch color bloom across Bucky’s hospital-hollow skin. He bites his lip instead, gripping Bucky’s hand tight.

“I thought you were dead, jerk,” he whispers. He means to sound normal, but his voice breaks straight in the middle, cracking up in a spiral. “Don’t do that to me again, or I’ll personally make sure you’ll never come back.”

Bucky’s small smile widens a fraction. “Missed you too, punk,” he says.

Steve’s chest contracts tightly around his fragile heart, and all of a sudden the petals are rising up in his chest. He stifles the first rack of coughs, but has no choice but to let go when his body starts shaking violently, soft, velvety petals pressing against his teeth.

“Stevie?” comes Bucky’s voice, small and concerned. A hand grips Steve’s shoulder firmly. “Stevie? What’s wrong?”

Instead of answering, for his tongue is heavy with blue and yellow, Steve looks down through blurred eyes at his hands. His hands, which are starting to grow dark lightning-cracks up his fingertips, the telltale poisoning that comes with the final fatal stage of Hanahaki. It is this sign that makes Steve’s decision anyway.

He can’t hold this down for much longer, anyway, and he prefers that Bucky finds out about this from Steve himself- not the morbid corsage that grows from the throats of Hanahaki victims.

A blur of daffodils and cornflowers fall from Steve’s bloodied mouth when he lets his lungs hack up the death-flowers. A mess of petals and blossoms fall on Bucky’s cot, a dizzying array of wildflower colors, with tender green leaves poking through the chaos. Leaves are not a good sign, Steve recalls through a haze. They mean the flowers are also at their end.

Bucky looks like a deer in headlights, his hand painfully tight on Steve’s shoulder.

“I’m- I’m sorry,” Steve says shakily. “I was going to tell you- but your flowers for Natasha-“

It hurts too much to speak, and Steve is sucking in a breath when he’s hacking up a lung again, spitting out trampled petals from between his teeth.

“What?” Bucky whispers, voice nearly void of emotion. “Me and Nat?”

“Your Hanahaki flowers,” Steve manages. “Buck, I’m sorry. I love you.”

The world stops spinning for a moment before Bucky’s hauling Steve close in a stunted, awkward motion. “Steve,” he rasps, eyes wide and clear. “Steve, listen to me.”

Steve tried to, through a quickly rising jumble of thought. Bucky looks so beautiful, he thinks dreamily. He reaches out a hand to touch Bucky’s face. He misses, and his palm settles against Bucky’s neck. Steve feels like he’d be happy to fall asleep like this, warm and close by his favorite person in the world. It reminds him, somewhat, of the long lazy summers in junior high, when Steve-and-Bucky was the neighborhood’s notorious duo. That, he realizes, was when he fell in love with this idiot.

Bucky brings a hand underneath Steve’s face, the metallic one clenched in a fist. Slowly, the hand opens with a quiet whir. Steve’s mind trips over itself when he sees what Bucky was holding so preciously. Three colorful flowers, each emblazoned with a meaning that Steve recognizes from the early days of Hanahaki, when he’d read about all sorts of the deathly flowers.

Black-eyed Susan, determination. Gladiolus, strength. Lily of the Incas, aspiration.

“Stevie, it’s not Nat,” his daffodil summer murmurs. “It’s you.”

**Author's Note:**

> friend: hey when are you going to update your Black Panther fic?  
> me: haha don't worry i'll finish it  
> also me: lemme write this 5k fic on bucky and stevie loving and pining together ;)))


End file.
